DS 6.1 Updates

I've been doing work to improve the site. I think the next round of updates is just about ready and should be up sometime this weekend.

What can you expect from these updates?

Updated Appearance: The site will look better. It's not a full overhaul, but it'll be very obvious. The key is that the styles across different sections of the site will be the same, so it was a good opportunity to do those changes.

Blog Overhaul: The changes in the blog will be pretty big. It will become a mashup of RSS feeds from around the Blender community. (Current List in Spoiler) Just something to make it more useful. That said, I will still be writing occasional updates for those silent people who don't visit the forum.

Filtering: I've added the ability to filter results lists. Especially useful for the blog feeds and tutorials, but is also included so you can filter by artist in the gallery and models section.

Autoloading: Also on the results lists is the autoload feature. It wasn't in the blog before, but now it will be. I think that is the last place that needed it. Helps with site speed as well.

Related Items: This was something I added to tutorials not too long ago. Now it will be next to tutorials, models, and blog articles. Allows for people to have somewhere to go after finding something on the site.

Recommended Links: This is now set up so that only members can submit links. The reason being that the submitter now gets credit for sharing that link. This would allow me to use it in the reputation score I want to flesh out sometime in the future.

Performance: This the more technical side of things, but I've done lots of other tweaking here and there and consolidating JS and CSS. The Autoloading should help. I also lazy load comments (they won't load until you click on the tab).

Responsive: I'm actually quite proud of this. The site will be very squishy. I've got it looking nice on screens down to 320px wide and have it also work nicely on 1920px wide screens. This should really open up the site to mobile devices.

Bug Fixes: Eh, a little wary about saying this, but I've fixed some bugs that had been bothering me, but with so many changes, there are probably going to be new ones. Hopefully they are minor and I run into them sooner rather than later.

Overall, there wasn't really one huge update to be excited over other than the change to the blog. However, I think all these little changes combined will make a big difference. Any thoughts?